2026-09-11· Article· Mekaret · Read in FR

A voice in the chest

Dear Watchers,

I love listening to music so much I could not live without it. It touches me lower than the head that sorts: behind the sternum, in the throat, sometimes all the way into the legs. Violin and cello do this better than almost anything: they borrow enough from the human voice for the body to recognize itself, and enough strangeness for the body to grow uneasy. A second voice, stuck to the body.

People have said too often that the violin “makes you cry.” That is a comfort phrase. The bow can also consecrate, threaten, light a clarity in the chest, lay down a weight of mourning that words would refuse. The cello, lower, often holds the ground: desire, fatigue, prayer without a named god. Together they pass through a scene, and they make you pass through it with them.

I will not give you a taxonomy. I will follow that voice where it found me, station by station, and let each listening displace the one before.

Boléro: the first wow

My very first “wow” at a violin, or rather at violins, was the moment they took the bow and seized the main melody of Ravel’s Boléro, a few seconds after the tenth minute, done with pizzicato accompaniment from the start. They bring the lyrical power that drives the tension upward in crescendo, beside the military drum that holds the sixteen-bar rhythmic motif without flinching. It is striking how deeply the Boléro marked my child’s mind. The way tension rises without stopping, carried by that progressive entry of the strings, is almost hypnotic.

Lestat, then Queen of the Damned

Later, as a teenager, I rediscovered that voice in a literary register. In Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, the violin belongs to Lestat’s legend; it touches what should have stayed asleep. The image stuck: strings equal night, seduction, elegant danger. I was fascinated. Cinema gladly typecast the bow in that register, as if the instrument only knew how to speak postcard gothic.

French cover of Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles. — Lestat, the night, and the idea that a bow might wake what sleeps.

One more paragraph in Anne Rice’s world and on screen. After Interview with the Vampire came Queen of the Damned (2002), adapted for the wide screen. I found the first film very good, with Tom Cruise superb as Lestat (you feel he read the Chronicle to inhabit the Brat Prince; I love the actor as much as I dislike the public figure). The second is meh. The film, for me, is rather average: diluted myth, images that try too hard. The soundtrack holds. It almost saves the screening. Produced in Jonathan Davis’s orbit (Korn) with Richard Gibbs, it carries the nu-metal of the era, its scraping textures, its raw wound. And above all, it refuses the easy gesture. The script asked for “Paganini-style” violin, stock classical varnish for a chic vampire. Davis and Gibbs said no. They brought in L. Shankar and his double-neck violin, already hovering, already outside the Hollywood costume.

Hypnotic, I tell you: a cut from the OST

That detail matters to me. People shrink Davis too easily to a screamed vocal and stage bagpipes. A multi-instrumentalist, he also plays violin; later he would say he learned from Shankar, plugged into an amp, with no competition pretension. In Korn, the sounding body is an obsession: what scrapes, what rasps, what does not console cleanly. When the same man reaches for strings to clothe Lestat, I recognize the same quest for a voice that travels under the skin, only with another tool. And there is Shankar already haunting the film I find average. The OST knows what the film misses: the shiver comes through fine without the Hollywood décor.

Jonathan Davis on the Alone I Play tour, silhouette and violin. — Davis, beyond the stage scream: the sounding body, still.

Gothic metal: Tristania

A branch of metal took that voice as an icon. Not all of gothicism (gothicism has a thousand doors; many live without a bow). But in gothic metal, in doom tinted with atmosphere in the 1990s and 2000s, the violin became almost a stage sacrament. Tristania. The Sins of Thy Beloved (home, incidentally, of Pete Johansen, the violinist who also haunts Tristania). Strings forward, voices in contrast, melancholy that does not apologize. In that gothic metal, the bow equals the riff as much as the guitars do.

Dear Watcher, I do not know which track to hand you; so many marked me. Let us take Tristania and A Sequel of Decay: haunting from the first note. It closes Beyond the Veil (1999), which I consider Tristania’s masterpiece of symphonic gothic metal. The piece rests on a heavy, slow, melancholic atmosphere where Pete Johansen’s violin is crucial.

The track opens on a piercing, isolated violin melody, immediately joined by a discreet piano and the sound of driving rain: a dark theatrical set before the song even begins. Then the dialogue of voices: Vibeke Stene’s crystalline lyric singing against Morten Veland’s spoken or whispered line, intimate and resigned. Saturated vocals (growl) are almost absent; the lament takes the floor. Unlike the band’s more aggressive tracks, the violin here is insistent. It carries the main theme, returns between verses, deepens the sense of decay. Heavy guitars and mid-tempo drums support the line without smothering the acoustics or the voice. One of the group’s most stripped and emotional pieces: spleen and dramatic beauty over velocity. Yes, I love this band. It deserves several posts of its own.

Epica: the voice that confronts

Then the line widens. Epica, Design Your Universe (2009). I go back to it often. For me it is their peak: heavy metal, orchestration that actually holds. On Kingdom of Heaven, a long suite in the A New Age Dawns saga, the strings push and attack with the rest. Heaviness and bow hold like two breaths of the same body.

We are no longer in the spleen of A Sequel of Decay. The strings attack. When they enter the heaviness, I feel the same rise as in the childhood Boléro, but armed, theatrical in another way. The bow no longer waits until the tenth minute to dare the melody. It is already in the assault.

Falling In Reverse: strip the noise to hear the nerve

Later I heard Falling In Reverse strip the noise from their own songs. The Drug In Me Is Reimagined (2020). I’m Not A Vampire (Revamped) (2021). Last Resort (Reimagined) (2023). Piano, violins, violas, cellos, crescendos that could be film score.

The gesture touches me less as a “classy version” than as an admission. Under the overdriven punk, under the post-hardcore, there was already a lament. The Drug In Me Is Reimagined turns a charge into a complaint: piano opens, strings carry what gain had smothered. I’m Not A Vampire (Revamped) leans toward film drama; violas and violins tense the air. Last Resort (Reimagined) rides a crescendo of violins and cellos under the vocal, a Papa Roach cover become something else. The strings make audible the nerve that gain had smothered, as if that second voice had always been there, and was finally given air again.

Falling In Reverse, The Drug In Me Is Reimagined

Clara Ysé

Change of air, almost of inner continent. Clara Ysé, Le monde s’est dédoublé. Sary Khalifé’s cello (especially in the live capture that caught me) plays neither vampire nor metal cathedral. It plays the tipping: that morning when the real splits, when things lose their density, when a friend murmurs and the body no longer hears the same way. A barer spirituality, closer to breath. Yet I recognize the same family of affect: it touches before it explains, it moves through the chest before judgment has time to file it away. Thanks to my friend Rita for this delicious discovery.

Clair Obscur: games too

And games. Yes: I remain a geek, a gamer, a music lover. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. Lorien Testard’s soundtrack (with Alice Duport-Percier and others) reminded me of an obvious truth we still forget: video games have no reason to cede strings to cinema. Alicia (Violin), Nisa Addina on the bow: few words. Mourning, paint, a world held by a line. Games have violin, and when it is true, the shiver is the same as in a dark theater or in front of an amp.

Shankar: two necks, the loop

I could stop there. But the loop wants its close. L. Shankar (sometimes Shenkar) designed a ten-string stereophonic double-neck electric violin: from bass and cello range up through viola and high violin, hovering pads, resonance from one neck to the other. Born of the concrete need to stop stacking overdubs, the instrument became something else: a full range inside one body of wood and wire. Carnatic spirituality, rock, jazz, in the same gesture. We already heard it haunt Queen of the Damned. You can listen for its own sake, without vampire, without synopsis: a voice wide enough for the low and the high.

That is what I was holding, underneath, while lining up these listenings. Somewhere between skin and breath, bowed strings open a second voice. Styles displace it without exhausting it. If you have already felt it, you will know why I wrote. If you have not felt it yet, choose a single title from this path, lower the rest of the world, and listen with the sternum.

Sources

Ravel, Boléro (listening ref.). Violins taking the melody; childhood memory.
Queen of the Damned soundtrack. Davis / Gibbs; Shankar (double violin); 2002 nu-metal context.
Metal Hammer / Louder: Jonathan Davis on the OST. Refusal of stock “Paganini”; Shankar pitch.
Jonathan Davis. Violin among his instruments.
Louder interview: Davis learns violin with Shankar. Alone I Play tour.
Tristania, Beyond the Veil. 1999; A Sequel of Decay; Pete Johansen (also The Sins of Thy Beloved) on violin.
Epica, Design Your Universe. 2009; Kingdom of Heaven.
L. Shankar / Double Violin. Ten-string double-neck; use on Queen of the Damned.
Clara Ysé, live Le monde s’est dédoublé. Cello: Sary Khalifé.
Lorien Testard, Alicia (Violin). Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 OST; violin Nisa Addina.